August 31, 2010

The first of four lectures at at Old South Meeting House honoring the 150th anniversary of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride" will feature a little bonus: the missing stanza. In his lecture "Listen, My Children: 'Paul Revere's Ride' in Poetry and Legend," on Sept. 8 at 6:30 p.m., historian Charles Bahne will read for the first time aloud an entire, original stanza omitted from the poem's first publication in The Atlantic Monthly. While researching the poem, which polished up Revere's legend a bit, Bahne went back to Longfellow's original manuscript and found that 14 lines at the end of the poem were never published in any version, and may have been replaced by lines penned by someone at The Atlantic. Naughty! His lecture is the first in the Paul Revere Memorial Association's Series "One Hundred Fifty Years of Paul Revere's Ride: Facts, Fables, and Fiction." The series runs four consecutive Wednesdays, starting Sept. 8, and also includes talks by historian and blogger John L. Bell, educator Bob Damon, and New Yorker writer and Harvard professor Jill Lepore. The talks are free and open to the public at the Meeting House, 310 Washington St. in Downtown Crossing. More info: (617) 523-2338.

August 30, 2010

Tickets for the Boston Philharmonic 2010-2011 season go on sale Wednesday at www.bostonphil.org. Tix are $15-$75 for the Thursday Discovery series and $25-$85 for the Saturday and Sunday concerts. Subscriptions are on sale now via the web site and 617-236-0999. The concerts under the baton of Benjamin Zander (left) will include music by Gershwin, Ravel, Stravinsky, Debussy, Bruckner, Williams, Szymanowski, Elgar, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and guest artists including pianist Stephen Drury. The complete release is after the jump...

August 26, 2010

The Boston Book Festival has chosen Tom Perrotta's 2005 "The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face" as the first short story in the organization’s One City, One Story program. They say 30,000 copies of the story will be distributed as a bound booklet throughout the city, beginning in late September. Festival organizers hope that thousands of people will read it before a town-hall style event featuring Perrotta at the fest on Oct. 16. Related events will take place in Boston neighborhoods in the weeks before.

Perrotta lives in Belmont and has taught at Harvard; he's best known for his novels "Election" and "Little Children," both of which were turned into high-profile movies. Not exactly an off-the-wall choice (had to be either Perrotta or Lehane, right?), "Happy Chang" was originally published in Post Road Magazine and later in Best American Short Stories 2005. On the surface, it's the story of a Little League umpire who wants to throw a game to one team, and is typically Perrotta in looking for deeper moral quandaries underneath seemingly bland suburban facades. The fest organizers are careful to caution parents about "strong language."The story was chosen for its "accessibility, literary merit and ability to stimulate discussion" a panel of advisors to The Boston Book Festival.

The story will be distributed at Boston Public Library branches, subway stations, community centers, farmers markets and the like. A complete list of distribution locations will be available soon. It will also be available at www.bostonbookfest.org beginning Oct. 1.

August 25, 2010

Geoff Edgers' Globe article about the American Repertory Theater sure stirred the pot with its depiction of the schism between past and present ART regimes. If you think we don't have an involved theater community in town, go read the pages of heated comments. Some patrons say they were tired of what they saw as self-involved elitism and professional entitlement at the ART and praise Diane Paulus for bringing fresh artistic approaches, younger audiences and financial stability. Others damn Paulus as an artistic empty suit, a climber whose real focus is New York, and a profiteer. Amanda Palmer in "Cabaret," "The Donkey Show" and just about everything else under Paulus' tenure gets a vigorous going over. Many seem to agree that the ART was great under Robert Brustein and that "Sleep No More" was fascinating, but after that it's a knife fight.

Although all three are very different cases, I'm surprised no one has made much mention of Paulus parallels to the arrival of Malcolm Rogers at the MFA (angry ousted employees, criticism of lightweight, commercial crowd-pleasers) and James Levine (one foot in New York, hard on musicians, rich contract). Although Levine's' health issues have cast a shadow over his Boston presence, both men changed their institutions and survived, despite ongoing debates about artistic vision. The response to "Cabaret," opening soon with Palmer as the Emcee, will provide a clue to whether Paulus will do the same.

The Coolidge Corner returns its Science on Screen series for the season beginning Sept. 6 with the great Alec Guinness comedy "The Man in the White Suit," paired with a presentation on invention by Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and founder of the Ig Nobel Prizes, and Harvard chemist Daniel Rosenberg. In the 1951 film, Guinness plays a chemist who invents a new fabric that never gets dirty and never wears out; needless to say the textile industry will stop at nothing to bury his invention. Abrahams and Rosenberg will talk about the world's inventors, their sometimes wacky creations and the possibility of such a fabric being created. And Abrahams is allegedly going to wear a self-perfuming suit. Hmmm.

Tickets are $9.75 regular admission, at www.coolidge.org/science, or at the Coolidge box office. And here's enws for those of you reading from out of the area: The Coolidge Corner Theatre was awarded a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to help other independent cinemas launch their own Science on Screen programming!

August 19, 2010

The final roster of artists for the Tanglewood Jazz Festival on Sept. 4-5 includes the Eddie Daniels/Bob James Quartet with guest drummer Peter Erskine (Weather Report) and "Saturday Night Live" bassist James Genus plus the Donal Fox Quartet with cellist Maya Beiser (right) whose take on the Led Zepplin tune "Kashmir" seems to be a big Internet favorite to judge by the extra hits I get every time I mention it. (Maya Beiser! Kashmir! Optimized!) Also on tape are some usual suspects like Kurt Elling, John Pizzarelli, Jane Monheit and the Legendary Count Basie Orchestra. Tickets, $18-77, at www.tanglewoodjazzfestival.org or 888-266-1200, as well as the Tanglewood box office. Complete release after the Beiser video.

August 18, 2010

Friday at 7:30 p.m. at The Dance Place in the The Tannery here in Newburyport, there will be a benefit for Exit Dance Theatre with a little twist. Namely, live music from the father-son duo of Doc Zig and Benny Z, aka Jim and Benny Zanfagna. (I would skip the aliases and just play as Zanfagna, rendered all Led Zeppy like "Zoso," but what do I know?) They'll be playing their reggae- and folk-inflected, mostly acoustic Americana, with Mike Gruen on bass and Roger Ebacher on percussion, same as on their recent "Playing for Small Change" EP. (That's the cover image on the left, taken down on the marsh behind Old Town Hill.) And while they play, Fontaine Dubus and other Exit members will be dancing, including a new piece set to the Family Z's almost gypsy-ish "Run, Run." And all this for only a $10 suggested donation. More details: (978) 465-1485 or www.danceplacenbpt.com.

August 16, 2010

Good piece in the Herald this morning by Brett Milano on Palmdale, Kay Hanley's latest musical venture. Sure do wish he'd gotten her to dish some of the Miley Cyris dirt, though, sounds like there's a lot... A fond farewell to Big Red & Shiny, which is shutting down its main web presence on Sept. 1. The art journal beat us to the web by a year and a half. ... Word up on the latest from Esperanza Spalding, Berklee phenom turned bigtime jazz hero. ... Amanda Palmer's latest web exploit: Finding a terminally cute, Phillip Glass-loving, 17-year-old Canadian piano prodigy loitering at Berklee after summer camp and taking him home for a webcast. We'll be hearing from Tristan sooner or later, I'd wager. ... Oh and here's an interview with Steven Bogart, Palmer's high-school teacher who's directing her in "Cabaret" at the ART. ... And ehre's a little something for my North Shore neighbors, a Newburyport Arts piece on Andrew Mungo, who runs our beloved little art house theater, The Screening Room, and is now on the big screen himself.

August 11, 2010

It makes me middlebrow I guess, but despite the book and the Kirk Douglas movie and the Don McLean song and the "Starry Night" shower curtain and whatever else, I am still irresistibly drawn to all things Vincent van Gogh. I'll jump through hoops to see anything by the tormented genius with the heartrending bio, which was demonstrated yesterday when I finally got myself over to the MFA to see the dual exhibition of Van Gogh's 1888 "The Sower" with Jean-Francois Millet's iconic 1850 "The Sower," (left) a painting that much inspired him. Took an early train before a dinner, Green Line to the door, and found out I only had 20 minutes till closing and three galleries to run across. Did it anyway, and you should too between now and next Tuesday, when this first "Visiting Masterpieces" display closes.

August 09, 2010

Tickets to the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 2010-2011 go on sale this morning at 888-266-1200, www.bso.org or at the box office. Planned James Levine programs include the continuation of the Mahler cycle with Symphonies 2, 5 and 9 as well as the start of a new, two-year Harbison cycle and an opening-night all-Wagner performance with Bryn Terfel on Oct. 2. But of course the real question hanging over everyone opening their wallets for tickets is whether Levine will be on the podium for all those shows. There hasn't been much news about Levine since the initial news that he was skipping Tanglewood this summer to continue recuperation from surgery and resulting questions about his future.

One would like to think that if there was any doubt about his return in the fall, the orchestra would share that with us before opening the cash register. It would only anger fans further to plunk down big bucks for tickets to discover that in fact Levine's recovery would still not allow him to ascend the podium, and I think the BSO knows better than to let that happen. On the other hand, if I were the orchestra, I would have included a sentence in the release stating explicitly that Levine's recovery is proceeding at a pace that assures his return to the podium in October. It's not there. Read the complete release after the jump, along with a night-by-night schedule.